Worried about downtimes and maintenance windows of openSUSE services that you missed because there was no information provided? ;-)

Now is your chance to get informed about any (un-)expected downtime of any openSUSE service!

The openSUSE Heroes team is pleased to announce that status.opensuse.org is up and running as public status page, providing you with the latest updates about our infrastructure. We tried our best to get the page mobile friendly and easy to understand. Even RSS and Atom feeds are available. A big “thank you” to the team from Cachet, the open source status page system, for developing that great tool.

You wonder where this status page get’s it’s information from?

For the moment, the Heroes will update the page manually with information – until our new monitoring system is up and running and can take over some parts of the job. Thanks to a nice API, updates and status queries can be done even via command line (and therefor integrated in whatever tool you can imagine). But as we want to provide you with the best information available, we might still use a “human form” instead of automatism. Let’s see what the future brings and how familiar we will get with the tool…

One year after introducing a new kind of Open Build Service worker machines, the “lambkins”, the openSUSE Build Service got a big hardware refresh. The new machines, sponsored by SUSE, are equipped with:

– 2,8GHz AMD Opteron Processors (6348)

– 256 GB RAM

– one 120 GB SSD

Four of them are located in a chassis with a height of 2 units and run 12-16 workers on them (virtual machines, that are building packages).

That new build power allowed us to remove some of old machines from the pool. The unified hardware makes the management of the machines a lot easier now, even if there are still the most powerful old machines left.

For those who like some more pictures, feel free to check the rest of the entry… (more…)

While we had some fun and good food and drinks, we also managed to discuss a lot during the three days in the Nuremberg headquarter. This was needed because this was the first time that the Heroes came together in their current form. In the end, we managed to do no coding and even (nearly) no administration – but instead we started to discuss our (internal and external) policies and work flows – and did some decisions regarding the next steps and the future of the openSUSE infrastructure.

So what are our results – and how does the prioritized action item list look like?

Does it happen to you, too, that there are moments where you ask yourself why others want something from you that is there already since a while? Exactly this happened with https://keyserver.opensuse.org/: the original machine was set up a long time ago to make it easier for people attending the openSUSE GPG key-signing parties, but it looks like nobody officially announced this “new service” for our users…

…and so here we are: the openSUSE Heroes team is pleased to announce that keyserver.opensuse.org is up and running as public GPG keyserver. We are of course also part of the official keyserver pool, which means that some people might already noticed us, as they got redirected to our server with their requests. (And for those who are interested to setup their own SKS keyserver: we have also written a nice monitoring plugin that helps you keeping an eye on the pool status of your machine and the ones of your peers.)

The server may be accessed either via it’s Web interface (please ping the Heroes if you want to improve it) or via the openPGP HTTP keyserver protocol (HKP), which is normally used by GPG clients.
Try it out by calling something like:

After a long, but exciting first day, we even managed to get some sleep before we started again and discussed the whole morning about our policies and other stuff that is now updated in the openSUSE wiki. After that, we went out for a nice lunch…

openSUSE Heroes out for lunch.

…before we started the discussion about some other topics on our list.

Some of the openSUSE Heroes decided during the last openSUSE Conference that it’s time for more face to face meetings to “get things done” and “work together”…

Picture from the meeting with some openSUSE Heroes discussing

So starting today, some openSUSE Heroes started to spend the first December weekend in the SUSE Headquarter in Nuremberg. And they really have a lot to do, as you might imagine! That might be the reason why some of them started at 02:00 in the night to arrive at 07:00 in Nuremberg…

During the last weeks, the openSUSE board and others expressed their concern about the current state of some openSUSE infrastructure: especially the reaction times to change something in the setup were mentioned multiple times. Looks like we lost some administrators and/or contact points at SUSE who helped out in the past to eliminate problems or work together with the community.

As result, there was a meeting held during the openSUSE Conference 2016, including some SUSE employees and openSUSE community members to discuss the current situation and search for some possible solutions. The discussion was very fruitful and we’d like to share some of the results here to inform everyone and actively ask for help. If you want to join us, the openSUSE heroes, do not hesitate to contact us and join an incredible team!

The openSUSE build service becomes more and more a victim of his success: building constantly more than 300,000 packages for more than 43,000 developers needs really a lot of build power! And build power means not only CPU! It includes everything that you can expect from an IT infrastructure:

Old hard-drives from OBS-workers

CPU power

RAM (the more, the better)

Storage (temporary local, on the clients and also to store and distribute the results)

Network

electic power (and cooling, and maintenance, and manpower to maintain the hardware, …)

Thankfully our main sponsor SUSE allowed us now to buy some new hardware to replace some of the old machines that build software packages for over ten different distributions all day long.

What a start in the new year: the server running rsync.opensuse.org died with two broken hard disks at 2016-01-10.

As the hardware is located in the data center of our sponsor IP Exchange, we apologize for the delay it will take to fix the problem: we need not only the correct replacement hard drives, but also a field worker at the location who has the appropriate permissions and skills.

During the downtime (and maybe also a good tip afterward), please check on http://mirrors.opensuse.org/ for the closest mirror nearby your location that also offers rsync for you.